Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
“What? She’s
yours
?”
He snorted. “More the other way around.”
“But who—what
is
she?”
“A spirit, a demon, a witch,” he said, catching up the black queen and turning it in his fingers. “A dream the Griffin men dream because of their guilt and fear; or a cultural idea, an ethnic myth from a bloody nation. An old story, an ancient being from a time before mankind. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I deal with her when and as I must. You’ll never have to.”
Jess’s mind couldn’t find a foothold in this. Her thoughts shunted aside, back to the play, to Eva, who was as much a spirit of idealism as a character. The opposite of this ominous woman.
She sat up straighter, illuminated by a connection.
“It’s not an emerald, it’s a ruby,” she said. “The gemstone in Nick’s play. He put the whole story in his play. It’s a gesture of defiance, aimed at you!”
“The red flag to the bull, you could say,” Ivo replied. “I think so, yes.”
“But
why?”
“He knows he can’t fight me and win. He knows he can’t escape. Once he saw the Lady, he must have decided to get it over with instead of living his days in fearful anticipation. I’ve met some bold and impetuous men of that line.”
“But that makes no difference to you,” she said. “Whether they’re brave or not.”
“No, that makes no difference to me.”
“You’re going to kill him.”
His hand dipped, giving the white king a sharp tap that flipped it off the edge of the board onto the carpet. That was his answer.
“Oh, no. Ivo,
no.
”
He offered only silence, a terrible silence that felt like withdrawal down a corridor of centuries. From outside came a screech of tires and a car alarm much farther off. They were like sounds in a dream.
“Listen,” she said. “You owe me. I could have left you there in that alley with your injury, I could have gone for the police and told them everything.”
He laughed, then coughed. “You could barely walk at the time.”
“Damn it, I’ve helped you. I got you to my place to rest, I even got you here!”
He raised one finger. “One: you took my gifts and were careless with them. They’re ruined now.”
“You said it didn’t matter!” she cried, outraged at his duplicity. “You said the earrings were just trifles, and it was your own fault for giving them to me! I never
asked
—”
“Two: I’ve saved your fine looks, probably your sanity, and possibly your life tonight. This certainly cancels any debt.”
“Don’t be so sure about my sanity,” Jess groaned, rubbing her eyes.
This isn’t happening.
But there was something else, something that brought a flare of hope and a surge of new energy. He wasn’t out hunting Nick right now, he wasn’t boasting and threatening. He was here dealing with her, instead. He had kissed her once, and he had charged her attackers like a tiger, exuding fury, when they had done
him
no harm—as if he were angry on
her
behalf.
He cared; the monster cared. And while he cared, while there was that to use in some way, Nick might still have a chance.
“Three,” he concluded. “I’ve discovered for you the identity of your cowardly persecutor. It seems to me, Miss Croft, that
you
owe
me,
not the other way around.”
“And I can repay you,” she said. Now that she understood, her new course opened up before her, simple and clear. “What would you say if I helped you get hold of the Ruby Tear?”
He became very, very still and for a wild moment she wondered if he had died after all. Would he crumble into dust right in front of her?
“This is a trick,” he said at last.
“Trade me Nick’s life for the Ruby Tear.”
“You don’t have it to trade.”
“I’m telling you, I can get it! That is, I can show you where it is and help you get it.”
Silence again. Then he said, “I’ll listen.”
She took a deep breath. “Nick is out of the country, running from you—”
“I don’t think so,” the vampire interrupted. “Not running. Researching, I hear. I have sources of my own.”
“He and I were going to be married,” she hurried on, before she could change her mind and see her plan as the lethal folly it was. “I still have keys to his house in Rhinebeck, security system and all. And I know where the safe is. His dogs know me, and I know Dobermans. We should go up there right away, while Nick is still in Europe. There; you’ve turned me into a burglar.”
She stopped in heart-dropping consternation. “What I don’t know is the god damned combination! Can you crack a safe? It’s an old-fashioned one, no fancy electronics.”
“Are you trying to fool me?” he demanded. “The stone can’t be there. He must have put it in a safe-deposit box or a bank vault somewhere. You continue to think of me as hopelessly backward-looking. I do know modern ways, Jessamyn.”
Jess shook her head hard. “Nick hates banks and bankers, he doesn’t trust them; not since his mother’s trust fund was mishandled. He’d stuff valuables in a mattress before he’d turn them over to a bank.”
The Baron sat up, moving slowly but without having to stop for breath. “Then I’m an idiot,” he murmured. “I could have just gone and taken it, and Griffin would have come to me. You would never have been involved.”
He sighed and thought, rubbing his palm over his jaw with a rasping sound.
“You don’t know what to think, do you,” she said. For all his proud claims to sophistication, she could see that he was at a loss for the moment. “Ivo. Think of me as somebody who still loves Nick Griffin very much—”
“Oh, yes? Enough to betray him by handing over his most precious possession to his sworn enemy?” he inquired dryly. “That’s devotion indeed.”
“He won’t see it that way! Nick knows—” But who knew what Nick knew or believed these days? “Well, if he hates me, he hates me, that’s my problem. I want you to let him off the hook, him and his descendants. If helping you rob him is what it takes, that’s what I’ll do.”
“What if it takes more?” Soft-voiced, tentative.
Her heart hammered so hard her ears rang. At the same time she wanted to laugh:
oh, come on, why don’t you twirl your mustache while you’re at it, and leer? Are you
kidding
me?
She tried to answer, but her throat was too dry.
“Come here,” he murmured, “and lie next to me for a little while; there’s room on the couch, if we press close together. I’m cold, Jessamyn, cold at the core. The heat of my breath and my skin is generated from the blood that I drink. But the center of my body and the center of my soul are always cold.
“I was a normal, living man once. I still crave warmth. Touch revives me. If you’re honest, you’ll admit that I ask for nothing that you haven’t thought about giving me. And you are honest.”
She hugged her arms around herself, clammy with fear, trembling with a reckless impulse to do as he asked. Maybe he was doing to her with his voice what he said he could do, deviously sapping her will to resist him, even though he’d said he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, not with her. He could be lying. If she obeyed, he might take not just her body’s heat but her blood, even her life, and then go on to murder Nick after all.
The risk was huge; its allure was heart-stopping.
He went on, softly, “I’ll heal faster if you come help. I’ve held the vividness of your life in my arms tonight. I want your beating heart next to my heart.”
She’d felt his lips press on hers, she’d seen his phenomenal speed and strength bent to her support and protection. An increasingly powerful current of attraction had run beneath their time together since the beginning.
He had followed her tonight, and perhaps other nights, watching over her, a demonic predator turned guardian angel.
Who wouldn’t yield to an angel, given a chance?
As for the normal men she knew, what were they? Noble-looking Anthony Sinclair, who’d been trying to wreck her confidence and her career. Even Nick, who kept his darkest secrets from her and who had left her at the mercies of a ruthless enemy.
Worse, she was sorry for Ivo von Craggen, dragged through history by his single-minded search for a red stone, a bauble that could never in a million years replace everything he’d lost. And he’d been the one to speak of objects that couldn’t support the weight of symbolic meanings that people forced on them!
She got up and crossed to the couch.
“Make room for me, then,” she said.
His arms took her in, and his face pressed against her neck. She felt his breath on her hair and skin, and the rousing of his body that was so full of vital strength that it could overcome death. Tension tightened his embrace, folding her closer, as if he would take her into himself forever, melded with his own sturdy frame.
“What are you doing?” she mumbled.
“I need a few healing swallows of your health and vigor,” he said, his lips against her ear. “And the joining of two bodies into one being. Don’t be afraid: I have no living blood, so I carry no diseases and no seed to start new life.”
“So considerate,” she said faintly, in the dimness of the monster’s living room with its rented furniture. “Not very romantic, though. I’d expect a canopied bed at least, a desecrated altar, a soaring flight together in the icy moonlight.”
“I’ve had a long time to learn about what matters and what doesn’t.” He licked his thumb and smoothed her eyebrows and the fine hairs at her temples.
She couldn’t help it—she pulled back from him a little: a lion, grooming a cub.
“Jessamyn,” he said, in a normal voice with the lion-purr gone out of it, “I won’t force you. Say yes or no, I’ll still trade Griffin’s life for the Ruby Tear, as we agreed. I’m not a war leader now, a brutal boy with a sword, to take love as loot. I want more than I did then, or I’ll do without.”
He lay holding her, his strength and need leashed tightly, waiting.
Smart, smart bastard,
she thought, admiringly. How the hell had she gotten herself into this, and why didn’t she want to get herself out? Because his restraint freed her to acknowledge her own appetite for him, the hot urge that made her breath come quick.
“Jessamyn?” he breathed. “Will you answer?”
“Yes,” she said, and she relaxed in his embrace, willing plunder. His hands covered hers at the buttons to her blouse. She sank into the bottomless pit of his longing like red-hot gold through candle wax. He nuzzled her throat with greedy, grunting breaths. His lips pressed the skin taut, and two points like needles of ice pierced her there and spread an exquisite chill deep into her veins, drawing the heat from her as his sex built heat against her, and then inside her. She became one half of a ring of flowing fire and cold that he completed with his own body, sealed to hers at throat and groin.
She burned and flared and burned again; he groaned out words of a lost language as his body surged and shuddered.
They lay sweat-slick and extinguished in each other. She dreamed, sleeping enclosed in his arms, against his chest. But what she dreamed of, she could never remember afterwards.
Gems
H
e had a car, a rented Camry. He asked her to drive while he slept, still hampered by his injury, on the back seat. A plaid blanket from L.L. Bean shielded him from the full brilliance of the sunny morning. Daylight was no problem for him, but prolonged exposure to the full, bright face of the sun would slow his full recovery.
She doubted nothing anymore; he had left her sleeping sometime in the night and gone prowling for another meal just on the strength of the small sup of blood he’d had from her. He could move around without signs of pain later in the morning, when she’d dragged her drowsy self out of bed. A man who’d had an ice pick rammed in under his ribs the night before . . . .
Jessamyn, a sometime driver like most New Yorkers, kept pulling off the parkway to check the map while Ivo dozed on the back seat. She played the radio, softly. The music steadied her and kept her anchored in the present.
Now and then she slid a finger under the silk muffler she had taken from Ivo’s dresser drawer and she touched the two scabbed punctures on her neck. They itched slightly, but were too tender to scratch. Apart from this, she was unmarked and unharmed.
Except that her skin still tingled and her mouth felt bruised and decadent when she let her thoughts wander back to last night. It wasn’t the first sex she’d had since the accident, of course. There’d been some one she’d met at the physical therapists’, and an actor in the first acting class she’d taken after recovery—and, she thought with a shiver, there could have been bloody Anthony Sinclair, if she’d let that happen!
Not something or someone she wanted to think about now, or ever again actually, though she’d have to sooner or later. For the present, she ejected him forcibly from her thoughts.
It wasn’t that difficult, given the events of last night. Ivo might be a throwback to more a more primitive era (or was he a throw-forward from it?), but he’d had time to put some lovely polish on his interpersonal skills. Maybe she’d been so bowled over by the weirdness of the situation that she’d held herself together by concentrating entirely on the sex, with wonderfully invigorating results.
If this is the hangover that came from sleeping with a vampire, well, I’m all for it
!
One espresso and an omelet for breakfast, and she’d come as wide awake and energized if waking after a triumphant opening night. She felt completely herself, sharply alive to the day and its challenges Like helping Ivo get into Nick’s house, which she was on her way to doing . . . .
Don’t think about that, either.
There were better questions to ruminate on while she drove. Like, what did it
mean
that she had spent a night of blazing, sensuality with a vampire? That she was reckless, hungry enough for intimacy to give herself to a magical monster in some operatic gesture of self-sacrifice (
take that, Nick-you-secretive-bastard!
) that had turned out to be one hell of a roll in the hay? Or that she’d been mesmerized by some deep-level hope of catching immortality from a smooth-surfaced wild man from another time?
She felt like a buccaneer, not a burglar. An adventure had shouldered its way into her life, and she’d turned and embraced it, and, well, cheers to her!
Hell, she would do it again.
Would she?
She glanced at the blanket-swathed figure curled on the back seat like a big cat. She had really done this mad thing: made love with a man with a mind from the Middle Ages, an ageless body cabled with warrior muscle and a need for nourishment that he drew from the veins of living people.
So what am I
? she thought, darting out to pass a massive truck. Mistress of a demon, the bloodsucker’s girlfriend, the monster’s comfort and convert to his plans.
Making my comeback not on a stage at all, but playing the female lead in an impossible vampire romance.
She couldn’t let it alone. Her mind kept circling, swooping and hovering over the memory, the facts, all of it. It would have been different if he’d been cold to the touch, or smelled like decay. But he’d tasted like rain-washed stones, he’d smelled like hammered copper, and his hair was a lion’s mane . . . .
In a sober moment—after almost being sideswiped by a zippy little sports car—she saw a troubling symmetry.
Nick saw a woman on a white horse; am I delusional too, thinking I’ve been to bed with a vampire? Maybe we’re a pair after all, two cracked minds that would have been better off wiped out in that car wreck.
She watched herself spin rationalizations, questions, and re-runs of events, but nothing changed the bare facts into something less disturbing or less intoxicating.
The thing had happened, and she was speeding toward the consequences.
Well, she was
speeding
, anyway—
calm down, slow down, and take some deep breaths, because here’s the turn-off to Rhinebeck.
She parked near the far end of the lot and went into the inn for a cup of coffee, sitting by a window. She asked the waitress who was watching the Griffin house for Nick while he was away.
The woman recognized her, from visits here with Nick in the old days (as she now thought of their courtship). Paddy Garrow, it seemed, had the watchman’s job. He was a neighbor teenager who had house-sat before for Nick.
Ivo was laying low under the back seat blanket and stayed that way until they were out of the center of town. Then he emerged, sleepy-eyed and shaggily unkempt, to drink the go-cup of water she’d brought out of the inn for him. They didn’t speak; he lay down again and pulled the blanket over his head.
No one would think anything of Jess going to Nicks’s, but Ivo—he was a bit too memorable.
On the way out to the house, she began to worry. The “adventure” began to seem not only nutty but dangerous. What if Paddy Garrow had a gun to protect Nick’s property with?
And if he didn’t—if no warning shots brought neighbors to investigate, if everything went well—what then? Success would open doors to a new range of risks. Once Ivo had the stone, what if he left her on her own and hunted Nick down anyway? What if he turned coldly murderous and did what he thought he had to, to keep her from warning Nick? When had going to bed with a man meant that you could trust him?
There was a car parked behind the low-slung double garage adjoining the Griffin house, a rusty Chevy with a trailer-hitch in back. She drove on past, then swung around on a dirt track that wound its way over to a dumping ground no longer in active use.
There, as planned, they waited for dark, parked beside some scrawny evergreens. They didn’t talk much, but at some point in the long afternoon he reached for her again, and they fell together in a slithering tangle and lay interlocked until he took his lips from her throat and buried his face in the short curls at her temple.
“Any more of this will weaken you,” he said, “and slow me down. You must be strong, and I must be quick. Help me stop.”
She pulled away and got back behind the wheel while they retrieved and rearranged their disordered clothes. He came and sat up front on the passenger side, but didn’t say anything.
Combing her hair, Jessamyn looked at her face in the rearview mirror and hilarity bubbled in her throat: making out in the back seat of a car, how quaint! A few bloodspots on the upholstery instead of the usual stains—she shook away wooziness (how much had he weakened her already, how much had he drunk?) and handed him her comb.
“This may sound naive,” she said, watching his foxfur hair flatten and spring up again under the passage of the comb’s teeth, “but I’m not exactly the first, am I?”
“The first I’ve truly cared for?” He turned on the seat to look deeply into her eyes. “No, of course not. But you are the most special, Jessamyn—”
At that she gave way to gusts of laughter. When he pressed her anxiously for an explanation, she could only shake her head helplessly and wave off his questions while mirth shook her till her stomach ached and her eyes teared.
Vampire or no vampire, right now he was a man in a car with the woman he had just made love to, saying what any such man would say: “You are the most special . . . .”
She took her comb back and tucked it away with a sigh, serious again. How easy it would be to lose herself in these fierce embraces and fathomless driftings. With no effort at all, she could become one more plaything in what must be his long history of such toys, loved, no doubt, until they grew shapeless and frayed at the edges with use and time, or until someone more attractive and challenging came along.
Of course that could happen with any partner, but with this one it was absolutely inevitable, even if the one to bolt turned out to be herself instead of him. Time stood between them, centuries past and, if she were an idiot about it, a scant handful of decades still to come.
No, not just time already tugged their individual trajectories apart. Time, and death. He wasn’t just a soldier. He was a killer, from a time when men killed easily and vengeance was a rule of conduct for his class.
She glanced sideways at him, the shapely mouth and exotic eyes, the broad lion face. She’d gotten herself into a crazy place, here, and the advantage was his since he’d been there before, with an unknown number of women. He’d know what to expect from her.
She looked at her watch. “It’ll be dark soon. But, Ivo, you have to promise me one thing.”
He looked at her warily. “If I can.”
“The kid house-sitting at Nick’s—I know him. He’s a local boy, harmless and not too bright. I don’t want him hurt.”
“Is he someone important to you, or to Nick Griffin?” he said.
“No,” she said quickly, jolted by the implications of his question.
He shrugged.
“If he doesn’t make trouble for me, I have no reason to trouble him.” She saw that she’d have to settle for that.
* * *
Paddy Garrow was lounging in front of the living room TV set. They saw him through the window, holding an open beer can on his stomach with one hand and lazily channel-surfing with the other.
Jessamyn unlocked the back door, eased it open, and chirped softly to the dogs. They didn’t bark, but rushed to lick her hands and step excitedly on her feet. Beth had a sniff of Ivo, who stood very still and did nothing, while Mac rolled on his back waving his paws in the air and wouldn’t get up until both his armpits had been scratched.
Jess commanded the dogs to lie down on the back porch and stay there, her voice covered by what sounded like high-pitched soccer commentary from the TV.
Ivo brushed past her down the passage and vanished around the corner of the doorway into the living room. The television sound clicked off abruptly, and she heard metal curtain rings slide and clash together.
She reached the doorway with quick strides and looked inside. The young man slumped half-naked on the sofa, eyes shut and breath noisy. Ivo knelt, mopping up spilled beer from the floor with the boy’s T-shirt. The drapes were drawn, and only one standing lamp still burned.
She noticed the smear of blood on Ivo’s chin with almost clinical detachment, but the moment for misgivings was long past (this must be how it began, the necessary distancing of yourself from the unthinkable deed, the first layer of callousness necessary to a vampire, or a vampire’s lover). She could only hope that Ivo had kept his word and done no serious harm.
Quickly, afraid that Paddy might come to sooner than expected and need rougher silencing, she led the vampire down into the cellar of Nick’s house.
“It looks like the set at the theater,” Ivo murmured, glancing around. “For your play.”
Jessamyn turned on the light and saw his pupils shrink instantly, catlike. Her scalp crawled.
Keep going, can’t turn back now.
Yet some part of her wanted to kiss the lids of those tilted, animal eyes.
But hadn’t the safe been hidden before? No. She had been looking on the wrong wall.
“There,” she said, pointing to a spot between two joists near the back of the cement-lined chamber.
“That’s a fuse box,” he said.
“The real fuse box is upstairs.” Jessamyn opened the lid and pulled out the plate under it, with its dummy circuit-breakers. Behind this lay the safe.
“Is there an alarm?” Ivo asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered with some asperity. “I’m not normally a house-breaker, so I never thought to inquire.”
He didn’t smile, being too absorbed in running his fingers over face of the safe. “I can manage this, I think,” he said. “You could go and see to the dogs, that they don’t become restless or change their minds about me.”
“What about Paddy?”
“Paddy?” His narrow-eyed stare made his face look totally alien. She forced herself not to turn and run.
“The kid upstairs, Paddy Garrow. Is he likely to wake up any time soon?
Now she got a brief smile, a small shake of the head—of course not.
She thought she caught sight of fangs. Her stomach lurched. Maybe she was making a fatal mistake. Maybe he made love to impressionable girls all the time and then drank them dry on his way out.
He had sung to her in a wavering, oddly nasal voice what he’d said was an old love song of his country, sometime during their long, flowing coupling of the night before. She couldn’t remember the tune, only the strange minor key and the exotic eastern tone. He’d licked the sex-sweat off her scarred eyebrow with his tongue.
She had to believe he wouldn’t kill her.
“Okay, I’ll go keep watch upstairs,” she said.
He nodded, fiddling with the safe like a cracksman in a gangster movie. She ran upstairs.
All seemed quiet, except for Paddy’s stertorous breathing and a clock ticking somewhere nearby.
They were going to get away with this. She could hardly believe it; her blood fizzed with exhilaration. She stepped outside for a breath of cold, sobering air.
The dogs were gone from the porch. She thought she heard them moving quietly out in back and she called them, gingerly. No one would hear, no one lived close enough. But still—"Mac!" she whispered, as loudly as she dared. “Beth!”
“It’s bad luck to name the Scottish play,” someone said from the murk beyond the porch light’s glow. “If you have to call them, try Beth first,
then
Mac.”